Chesterfield
Notional 2005 Results:
Liberal Democrat: 21035 (46.6%)
Labour: 18462 (40.9%)
Conservative: 3784 (8.4%)
Other: 1838 (4.1%)
Majority: 2573 (5.7%)
Actual 2005 result
Conservative: 3605 (8.2%)
Labour: 17830 (40.4%)
Liberal Democrat: 20875 (47.3%)
UKIP: 997 (2.3%)
Other: 814 (1.8%)
Majority: 3045 (6.9%)
2001 Result
Conservative: 3613 (8.1%)
Labour: 18663 (42%)
Liberal Democrat: 21249 (47.8%)
Other: 916 (2.1%)
Majority: 2586 (5.8%)
1997 Result
Conservative: 4752 (9.2%)
Labour: 26105 (50.8%)
Liberal Democrat: 20330 (39.6%)
Other: 202 (0.4%)
Majority: 5775 (11.2%)
Boundary changes
Current MP: Paul Holmes (Lib Dem) born 1957. Educated at Firth park Secondary and York University. Former teacher. Chesterfield councillor 1987-1995, 1999-2003. MP for Chesterfield since 2001. Work and pensions spokesman 2002-2005, chair of Lib Dem Parliamentary party 2005-2006, arts of culture spokesman 2006-2007, housing spokesman until December 2007 (more information at They work for you)
Candidates: 
Toby Perkins (Labour) born 1970. Educated at Silverdale Comprehensive School. Former sales rep and recruitment manager. A qualified rugby coach, he now runs a rugby merchandising and equipment company. Chesterfield councillor.
2001 Census Demographics
Total 2001 Population: 88747
Male: 48.8%
Female: 51.2%
Under 18: 21.4%
Over 60: 22.9%
Born outside UK: 2.6%
White: 98.1%
Black: 0.4%
Asian: 0.6%
Mixed: 0.7%
Other: 0.3%
Christian: 77.9%
Full time students: 2.1%
Graduates 16-74: 14.7%
No Qualifications 16-74: 34.2%
Owner-Occupied: 66.6%
Social Housing: 25.9% (Council: 23.1%, Housing Ass.: 2.9%)
Privately Rented: 5.5%
Homes without central heating and/or private bathroom: 4.2%
Cont.
There are several reasons why I am of the opinion that a Tory revival in Chesterfield will mainly hurt the Lib Dems. Firstly, Kevin, you are wrong about the boundary changes. If anything their impact is against the Lib Dems. Take a look at the notional result at the top of this page. The area Chesterfield loses to NE Derbys is part of a ward won easily by the Lib Dems at the last borough elections in 2007 and is part of the only county division which saw the Lib Dem vote share increase last week.
Secondly you have to remember the context in which last weeks elections took place. Labour nationally could scarcely have been in a more chaotic state and their projected share of the national vote for the locals lagged behind the Lib Dems. Yet in Chesterfield their vote held up well, decreasing by slightly less than that of the Lib Dems.
Last weeks elections were the first for well over a decade in which there was any serious campaigning on the part of the Conservatives. The result has encouraged us to the extent that we will be giving the next GE a real go as a prelude to hopefully getting councillors elected at the next borough elections in 2011. The areas we will be concentrating on are Lib Dem. This will probably mean that the Lib Dems will have to divert resources to parts of the town that for the last few GE they have been able to take for granted. Indeed their are indications that this did happen in the run up to last Thursday.
My reading of the situation is that the Labour vote in Chesterfield is more solid than that of the Lib Dems. You say that the Lib Dems “narrowly” won the constituency in the Euro vote. I do not have those figures but surely if Labour are anywhere near the Lib Dems in Chestefield when they are polling under 16% nationally, that backs up my assertion about the solidity of the Chesterfield Labour vote.
Our message about the shortcomings of the Lib Dem council and of Paul Holmes as an MP is, I reckon just begining to get through to the Tory leaning voters in the south west corner of the town, who have hitherto voted tactically. We will be making the point several have made on this thread that there is very little value in anyone with broadly Conservative sympathies voting for someone as left wing as Mr Holmes to keep out Labour.
Basically would agree with Kieran and not Kevin.
Firstly the ward that had the biggest swing to the Lib Dems (Staveley North and Whittington) is predominantly in Derbyshire NE.
The European elections actually showed a swing to Labour (how many other seats in the country did Labour record a positive swing last Sunday?), and the Lib Dems won by a total of 80 votes. Given the SN & W result I would say it is almost certain that we actually won the vote in Chesterfield Parliamentary constituency.
The Lib Dems were unable to take any of the four seats that we held even though they needed relatively modest swings and in the three most marginal seats the swing was to Labour from the Lib Dems.
An encouraging set of results for Labour in Chesterfield, understandably overshadowed by the County going Blue, and Kieran is right that the biggest gainers in vote share was the Tories who almost doubled their vote.
The European election result was:
LD 7141
Lab 7061
UKIP 4123
Tory 3763
BNP 2221 (I think - BNP vote might be slightly wrong, but rest are right.)
An interesting one to watch. Thanks to the contributors.
I should not draw too many conclusions from the Euro result (even though the Lib Dems won) as both Lib Dems and Conservative will tend to underperform compared to other polls.
However you need to compare the county result for 2009 with the same poll in 2005 (same ward boundaries and electors) and the result is Lib Dem 43.4% -3.5%, Labour 36.5% - 6.7%, Conservative 16.4% + 7.3%.
In other words the Lib Dems increased their lead over Labour from 3.7% to 6.9% in 2009 despite the increase in the Conservative vote. I dont understand how this can be spun as a poor result for the Lib Dems.
Looking at the county results for Chesterfield excluding Staveley N (which does give a better approximation of the parliamentary boundaries) and comparing with the ‘05 county results I get slightly different figures to you Kevin, but I agree with you as to the general trend. I just think that you are taking the results too much at face value and failing to put them into context. I am working on the pretty safe assumption that at the GE Labour perform better nationally than they did on June 4th, when their projected national share of the vote for the locals was 23%.
Labour put a lot of effort into holding their four county seats in the town, at least two of which looked very vulnerable. The fact that this was ultimately successful suggests to me that Labour still have quite an effective campaigning machine in Chesterfield, which can to an extent buck a national trend of complete collapse.
As I have said, there will be a far more concerted effort on the part of the Conservatives at the next GE and this will be directed at the strong Lib Dem areas where we hope to take council seats from them in 2011. To successfully defend this seat the Lib Dems will have to fight on two fronts; something they have not had to do for a very long time. Paul Holmes’ record and that of the local Lib Dem council provide us with plenty of ammunition to use against them.
I am confidently expecting the Tory vote here at the next GE to increase at the expense of both the other parties, as it did on June 4th. I just suspect the Labour vote to be that bit more solid than the Lib Dem vote. That may well be enough for Labour to take the seat.
Keiran’s said much of what I was going to, the key point being that this election took place under much less favourable conditions for Labour than 2005, and yet the result was substantially unchanged, a point that Kevin seems to have either missed or ignored.
There are few things more tedious than two (or even three) different groups of politicians arguing over which side really ‘won’, given the results in Staveley and the fact that the Libs did indeed increase their overall majority, maybe there is comfort in the result for all parties.
If Keiran is right that the Conservative will up their efforts consistently from now the next few years could be very interesting indeed.
I can assure you, Toby, that the Chesterfield Tories will be putting in some hard work over the next two years. We will be putting up a full slate of candidates in Walton and West in 2011; it’s a while since we’ve even been able to manage that! I do though have some worries. We are still a very small party in Chesterfield and are hamstrung to an extent by the fact that we don’t have an office in the town and have to rely on Matlock for the production of all campaign material. It was noticable during the county campaign that we were, understandably, fairly low down on their list of priorities as the campaign was directed at those seats we needed to win control of the county, none of which were in Chesterfield. The leaflets for my division were not available until the day the first postal ballots went out, and I understand it was a similar story across town. Had we been a bit more ahead of the game I reckon we could have had an even better result.
We now have a window of opportunity over the next couple of years to make gains in Chesterfield. I feel we are in a bit of a race against time though as we will probably win the next GE and history shows that it is very difficult to move a party forward at local level when you are the governing party at Westminster facing normal mid term unpopularity.
I certainly wont be dissatisfied if an increase in our support helps you win the seat Toby. My sister lives in the ward you represent on the borough and from what I’ve heard about the work you do there the town will not want for decent representation with you as its MP. I just hope if you do win you are one of under 200 Labour MPs sat on the opposition benches!
Kieran
Your commitment is to be commended but is it really in the Conservatives long term interest?
There will always be other constituencies in Derbyshire where Conservative resources can be more effectively used and any significant return of Conservative voters here is likely to turn Chesterfield back into a safe Labour seat whereas at the moment it drains resources from both Labour and the LibDems.
Of course it would be nice to have Conservative councillors back in Chesterfield and there would be a good chance that if elected they would hold the balance of power on the council. The Conservative successes in nearby Dronfield should give the Chesterfield Conservatives much encouragement.
While writing this comment the though has occurred to me that many of the towns in this area have similar names - Chesterfield, Dronfield, Mansfield, Ashfield. Anyone know why?
Obviously Richard we would not want any extra effort on our part in Chesterfield to divert any significant resources from the key parliamentary battles in the rest of the county. Our effort in Chesterfield will be on a far smaller scale to that in other Derbyshire seats such as Amber Valley. I just think that this idea of ruthlessy targeting only those areas in which you can win parliamentary seats can be taken too far. A truly national party seeking a real mandate should be looking at putting in creditable performances and having a presence in town halls across the country.
I do find it really dissapointing that we have no councillors at all in places like Sheffield and Newcastle, even though we could in theory win a landslide majority in the Commons without getting a single vote in either of those cities. Hopefully Chesterfield will not be one of those Tory free authorities for much longer. As you rightly say, if the numbers fall right in the rest of the town we could find ourselves in a position of real influence.
As to your point about our advance making the seat safe Labour again, I really don’t see any party making the seat safe in the near future. The county results show that the party that wins the seat next time will be the one that has been best able to limit the extent to which they lose votes to the Conservatives. As I have oultlined above, I see Labour as being better able to do that. I don’t however see them making the seat safe again though, firstly because Labour nationally seems set for a longish periond of unpopularity; and secondly because Chesterfield has changed demographically over the last twenty to thirty years so that it is less like the classic Labour mining town heartland than it used to be.
Kieran- Thanks for your kind comments, there is no doubt that there is a swing in sentiment back towards the Tories in Chesterfield for the first time since Ive been involved in politics.
We were wondering to what extent your inability to compete with Labour and the Lib Dems in terms of campaign resources would hamper your effectiveness at getting them out to vote so it must have been encouraging for you to get such an increased vote share.
Richard- You have to remember that Chesterfield had a Tory Council in the early 70’s, demographically it’s probably pretty similar to Crewe and Nantwich.
There are all sorts of places that in 1983 it would have seemed ridiculous Labour winning but by 1997 because of local activists and a benign national situation suddenly had Labour MP’s and Councils.
As for resources, the closeness of the Lib - Lab fight means that the local parties will probably be continuing to fight it full on for many years, and don’t think an improvement in the Tory vote is going to change that, certainly not for the Lib Dems who dont have any other seats where they are even a close 2nd in Derbyshire.
I agree with a lot of the comments here, by Kieran and Toby.
As a democrat first, I like to see a respectable Tory vote even in very weak seats, and a respectable Labour vote in safe Tory seats, and not just for the reason that it makes it more dificult for he Lib Dems ,
but that is important that the two parties competing
for government have a reasonable base of support across the country.
I would hope that the Tories do pick up votes almost everywhere like in 1979, but likewise I hope Labour retains a respectable vote in southern and rural seats, aswell as some seats there.
Certainly I wish Toby well here, and I hope the Tories increase their vote - it sounds encouraging.
Paul Holmes expenses were finally reviewed by the local newspaper this week and he had a pretty rough ride.
Amongst the ‘highlights’ apart from the £9.5K payment that he pocketed for being one of the Dolphin Square dozen, were 4 cameras purchased in an 18 month period, and his food claims (his claims exceeded the maximum amount three times ).
He also claimed for new flooring throughout his rented office and charged the tax payer for his late payment fee after he was late paying his utility bills.
One particularly memorable line was :”Being an MP is clearly hungry work if Mr Holmes expenses are anything to go by.”
No idea how this will be viewed by the wider Chesterfield public, but thought it might be useful intelligence for readers of this site- watch this space.
Mr Holmes will no doubt suffer through an unflattering comparison with the expenses claims of MPs in neighbouring constituencies. Dennis Skinner in Bolsover is one of the lowest claimants in the country, whilst Natascha Engel of NE Derbyshire chose to publish details of her claims in their entiriety in advance of their official publication, and perhaps more importantly ahead of the county council elections; something Paul Holmes was extremely reluctant to do. One could be forgiven for thinking that he felt that what was in any case an underwhelming performance by the Chesterfield Lib Dems would have been worse had the voters had the chance to express their feelings about the actions of their MP.
Just came across again my favourite quote from Paul Holmes re his signing of the infamous commons motion praising certain aspects of the Castro regime:
“Its true Cuba has political prisoners and no free elections, but it has very good dentistry.”
Oh dear!